Independent · 105 hosts tracked · pricing checked 28 Jul 2026 Our method Compare No paid placements
Ad disclosure: We earn a commission if you buy hosting through links on this page. It never changes what we write or how we rank — see our review method. Read our method →
Updated 28 July 2026

How we research, score and get paid

This page exists so you can check our work and discount it where it deserves to be discounted. The limitations section is the most important part — it is section 06.

01

What we do not do

We do not run our own speed tests, uptime monitors or support-response timing.

Any site that shows you a precise millisecond figure should tell you how it was produced. Ours are not measured, so we do not show any. The scores below are editorial assessments, and section 03 says exactly what each one rests on.

02

Where our data comes from

Prices & plan specs
The provider's own published pricing pages, cross-checked against independent round-ups. Every host record stores the source and the date it was last checked, and both are shown on the review page.
Features & limits
Provider documentation and knowledge bases — storage, visit caps, refund windows, datacenter locations, control panel, PHP/SSH support.
Reliability & support quality
Aggregated public customer feedback and the provider's own published SLA. This is second-hand evidence and we weight it as such.
User reviews on this site
Submitted by visitors, moderated by hand. We publish none that we wrote ourselves.
03

What the score actually means

Each host gets five sub-scores out of 10. The headline number is their weighted average, split like this:

  1. Performance 30% Inferred Published infrastructure (NVMe/LiteSpeed, CDN, caching layers, cloud provider and region count) plus aggregated public reports. Not our own benchmarks.
  2. Support 25% Second-hand Channels offered, hours, and the balance of public customer feedback about response quality.
  3. Features 20% Documented Documented capabilities: staging, backups, object caching, PHP version control, SSH, email, migration tooling.
  4. Pricing 15% Sourced & dated Renewal price rather than the intro price, plus refund window and overage charges. This is the criterion we can verify most directly.
  5. Ease 10% Inferred Control panel design, onboarding flow and migration friction, from provider documentation and public feedback.

Pricing is evidence-based; performance is judgement. If you only trust one column on this site, trust the renewal price — it is the one we can point at a source for.

04

Rank order inside a list

The overall score is universal; a ranking is not. On Best WooCommerce hosting an editor weights checkout performance and object caching more heavily, so the order can differ from the raw score. Where it differs, the "best for" label on the entry says why.

05

How we make money

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy hosting after clicking one, we may receive a commission from the provider at no extra cost to you. This is disclosed at the top of every page and every commercial link carries rel="sponsored".

  • It does not change a score. Scores come from the rubric in section 03.
  • It does not buy a position. No provider can pay for placement.
  • It does not remove criticism. The highest-paying host on this site also carries a renewal warning on every page it appears on.
06

Limitations, stated plainly

  1. Prices go stale

    Hosting pricing is regional, promo-dependent and term-dependent. The only authoritative number is the one on your own checkout page. Every price here carries the date it was checked.

    A nightly job re-reads each host's pricing page and checks whether the figure we publish is still on it. When it is, the check date moves forward on its own. When it is not, the page is flagged for a person — nothing here is ever changed by a script. Three limits worth knowing: several hosts block automated requests, so those are only ever checked by hand; renewal rates are frequently absent from pricing pages altogether, which is why we never let the job guess one; and a host that quotes in another currency is left alone rather than converted at a rate we would not be able to show you.

  2. Sources disagree

    Where publishers quote different renewal rates for the same plan we take the most widely repeated figure and note the disagreement on the review page. We do not silently pick the most dramatic number.

  3. Performance scores are inferred, not measured

    Stated in section 01, repeated here because it matters.

  4. We have not used every host

    Where we have not, the review says so rather than implying hands-on experience.

07

User reviews

Every user review is moderated by hand before it appears. We reject reviews that name no specifics, reuse text found elsewhere, or arrive in bursts from one network. Reviews marked VERIFIED CUSTOMER are ones where we saw an invoice or dashboard screenshot. We do not delete negative reviews at a provider's request, and we do not write reviews ourselves and present them as customer feedback.

08

Corrections

Found something wrong?

We will fix it and note the change. Corrections about pricing are the most useful thing you can send us — a screenshot of your renewal invoice beats any source we have.

contact@hostcliff.com
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